The Lost Interview: Introduction by John J. Vester

I met Kim Stanley Robinson (whose work I had not yet read) almost 30 years ago at Cobblestone Books in Sacramento, California. At the time, I was an aspiring hard sf writer and he was working on his Mars trilogy. I bought my copy of Author’s Choice Monthly – Issue 20, which he signed with the note “Glad you started with this one,” and he crossed out the sketch of him on the page facing the title page, with a strong, “This is not me!”

I knew immediately, after reading some of his short stories, that he was an author to watch. I devoured almost all of his output up to Green Mars (which he was still working on) and everything since.

As I was trying to get my own writing career going, our paths occasionally crossed. The sf critique group I was with invited him to come and give a talk. He accepted and, as a bonus, Karen Joy Fowler came along. They gave us a wonderful evening. As the cliché has it…good times.

Mr. Robinson was always open and candid whenever I saw him. Once, at a café in Davis, we discussed his trumpet and his stage fright—something we found we had in common (except the trumpet). I once asked him about the map of Mars in Red Mars. I thought the topographic features did not match the labels. He confirmed that the printer had flipped the transparency left to right before combining it with the place names. Not fixed in either the hard bound or the first trade paperback editions. He shook his head in dismay as if bemoaning the author’s lot. And don’t get him started on the cover illustration on the British first edition.

During one of our encounters, I got up the nerve to ask him if I could interview him for publication, which he graciously agreed to. I had queried a short lived magazine— “Expanse”— which accepted my proposal. On March 14, 1994, I visited the Robinson home in Davis, where he still lives today. We did the interview in his study. This was years before he discovered the writing sanctuary of his side yard.

Once the interview was done, a draft write-up reviewed by the interviewee, and the final sent out, I received a kill fee from “Expanse,” which promptly went under.

Over the years I have attended Stan’s local talks, part of his book launches. Just over a year ago, I saw him at a reading/signing in San Francisco. He was promoting Naming Mount Thoreau, and I told him I would plan to do the hike to the top of Thoreau late the following summer. One thing led to another and I and my hiking buddies ended up, at Stan’s request, bringing back the summit register that he, along with a group of friends, had placed there in 2014. We also left behind a brand new register.

During our frequent correspondence about this hiking project, and in response to an email blast I had sent out announcing a couple of sales to “Analog” magazine, Stan emailed me his congratulations, and pointed out that, according to his journals, it was almost exactly 25 years ago that I had done the interview. “That’s a long time!” he added. It sure was.

The interview never did find a home. The timing was quickly becoming less and less advantageous. The buzz about the Mars books was waning, and the author turned to other wonderful, non-Mars books. So the interview slept in my files.

His reminding me of it got me to think about this web site, and how, during this silver anniversary of the Mars trilogy, it might be well received at kimstanelyrobinson.info. Stan liked the idea. He sees the interview as a sort of time capsule of the time he was working on the trilogy.

So you could say Kim Stanley Robinson and I are long time acquaintances, and, although we don’t socialize, I like to think we’re friends. But one of my fondest memories will always be the kindness he showed me, 25 years ago, to sit still and have his picture painted in words.

Based on recent conversations and interviews done by others, I am amazed at how little KSR has changed over the span of years since I interviewed him—how consistent he has remained—how deep those roots grew.

I hope this glimpse into the author’s past is enjoyable reading. I am delighted to be able to share his likeness in words with the many Kim Stanley Robinson enthusiasts who rely on this great web site. Robinson himself seems to like the interview, so I don’t think I need to fear a “This is not me!” from him.

John J. Vester
Rancho Cordova, CA
10-1-19

He's the picture of health and athletic fitness, and he's eager to get to work every morning, in spite of the commute; Mars to Davis, California and back.

Kim Stanley Robinson has been engaged in one of the major works of his career, a massive trilogy about the planet Mars. The first two books have been published. Red Mars and Green Mars have received almost unanimous acclaim, critical as well as commercial. He's now writing Blue Mars, due out in '96—the culminating expression of the most completely thought out and deeply felt of the current wave of books about the Red Planet.

This is Robinson's big book. It's been his professional focus since starting the research thirteen years ago. A casual glance around his comfortably cluttered study makes that clear. Maps of Mars, ancient and new, share wall space with a picture of Louis Armstrong. Books about Mars line his shelves and litter available desk space. He shares pictures of Kasei Vallis, or engages in a search for Solis Lacus with an enthusiasm that's infectious.

Although a trilogy, Robinson sees his Mars books as constituting one novel, like the old Victorian three-deckers. When he originally embarked on the project he promised himself to take the time, effort and the number of pages needed to give this book the full on feel of the "big novels."

"Everybody remembers reading a big novel that meant a lot to them, and which resonated long after...where the writer tried to put everything that he knew into the book. Those books feel special." He lists books that filled that bill for him; Moby Dick, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, Lawrence Durell's Alexandria Quartet, Delany's Dhalgren, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Does he believe he's writing a classic too? "Well, I'm not done yet. Things may fall apart. But I want it to be."

#

Go under the real, to the heart of the real,
where what we can trust is not what we feel,
but what we then know...
—The Memory of Whiteness

The Mars trilogy, like most of Robinson's major works, is a huge thought experiment. The basic attraction of Mars was, for him, the same as the attraction he's always felt for out of the way, barren, deserted, amazing landscapes. Part of it is his southern California upbringing—the wide open spaces, the great drama of western geology and geography. Transplanted to the Red Planet, it's irresistible, "because it's all above tree line, it's all rocky, it's all canyons and mountains and wide spaces—all parts of Earth that I most enjoyed backpacking in. An entire world of it."

But the deeper attraction seems to be the historic purity of the planet. Mars represents the ultimate tabula rasa, upon which Robinson has been able to write and erase his characters' accomplishments and mistakes, making and remaking history literally from scratch—an even more irresistible lure for a man whose second anthology of short stories was titled Remaking History.

In an important metaphor in Red Mars, Robinson describes the cratered landscape of Mars as a "palimpsest," which is a parchment from which writing has been partially erased to make room for a new text. Just as it is the job of the planetary scientist to deduce the age and origin of surface geological features from the fragmentary, partially obscured crater patterns, so it is the historian's job to deduce the truth of past human events through the fragmentary, often untrustworthy, evidence that comes unreliably through to us in the present.

To truly understand the palimpsest it would be wonderful to watch the very first person to write on it. That is what Robinson does in Red Mars.

But first there is the blank parchment.

For Robinson, that is the bare, exposed bedrock of Mars, or the Himalayas, or the wind swept, rain soaked tip of Newfoundland. It is the gritty, cold, hard reality of place.

And also the healthy, highly active human who experiences it—the animal performing on the stage of life—improvising existence.

#

If the highest response to the universe
is an ecstatic melding with it,
then surfing is the best way to spend your time
—The Gold Coast

Part of Robinson's daily routine is a morning swim with Masters, the swim club for adults. He's been swimming harder than ever, even though he's hard at work on Blue Mars. "The whole of 1993 I was thinking of my writing and my swimming as being in competition with each other. So I didn't do much swimming because I was really desperate to work on Green Mars. And what I'm discovering while doing the first draft of Blue Mars is that when I start my day off swimming and then write, I get more work done than if I had only written. The ideas flow more easily--I'm more efficient. Now that they're feeding into each other, I'm in better shape than I've been in for about eight years. Yeah! It feels good!"

Robinson also plays softball in a city league three seasons of the year. Baseball is an obvious joy for him, which shows in scenes in his California trilogy. In fact, the protagonist of The Wild Shore is named Henry Aaron Fletcher.

"I like a lot of sports, but a lot of them I have never found a way to get into stories. I got fencing into one short story, 'The Disguise,' early on in my career. But for the most part, I haven't figured out the right plots that work sports in."

But it's water and swimming that plays a recurring role in Robinson's writings. "The thing is," reminisces Robinson, "I grew up near the ocean and spent a lot of time in it. The first sport (well, the second after baseball) that really won my heart was body surfing."

He rode waves, flippers on, all day every day for many a lazy Orange County summer. A couple of times he almost drowned. In spite of his brushes with death (actually because of them), he's drawn, in his writing, to physical adventures in the outdoors, because that's where he's come closest to real danger. "I think when writers try to write exciting scenes, or crisis scenes, and come up with cliché‚ Hollywood shoot 'em ups, it comes across as bogus because these writers haven't experienced these things themselves. For me, the ground from which stories grow is one's own experiences. It has to be that. It's important it be that, rather than one's reading. Reading (and television) is second generation--a Xerox of a Xerox. It doesn't have the same intensity and richness."

Robinson writes jeopardy scenes that are very personal experiences for the reader as well, written less as exterior events to be observed than as interior events to be felt. "I hope they are. It's my way of doing something that is distinctively my own. I have to think up new plots that will allow me to write these scene in, because the standard clichés of plot won't encompass these adventures." To research a scene in The Wild Shore, for example, involving a midnight swim to the Orange County shore, Robinson actually swam a half mile out to sea and back one dark night.

"So I end up writing about those kinds of things because I feel I know them and can make them real again. It comes back to my own experience--more or less autobiographical writing."

To read Robinson's prose is to learn to know the writer himself. "There's autobiographical elements tucked all over the place in my work. In some places I've written down scenes directly out of my life, but only if I felt it makes a good story and it seems to fit. The Gold Coast is a very autobiographical novel, but turned into symbols. It's not literal autobiography, but sort of a metaphorical one--what it felt like to me at the time."

Robinson witnessed, first hand, the disappearance of the orchards of southern California, and that wholesale, precipitous change of environment made a profound impression on him. His California and Mars trilogies are studies of the changes man makes to the land and his adaptability to them. Robinson writes for the same reasons his protagonist does in The Wild Shore--to help him understand what has happened, and what is happening.

"I find that until you actually try to say something in sentences or write it in sentences, it's a little vague, compared to afterward."

#

Kim Stanley Robinson was born in 1952 in Waukegan, Illinois, but moved to southern California at three years of age. He is the older of two boys. His father was an electrical engineer and program manager on various Defense Department projects during the '60's and '70's, and he was a reader.

His parents instilled in Robinson a love of the printed word, actively and by example. His mother read to him frequently, and he became a reader at an early age. "I was always in love with reading. Much more so than with TV or movies or other media. I liked to read books, and I read them at a prodigious rate."

Robinson's mother was very important in his development and education. "She believed that physical activity, mental activity and musical activity were all three equally important, and gave equal weight to them." That meant academics, American sports and High School Band. It wasn't just lip service either. His parents got Robinson involved in all three, "…in a kind of balanced life which I think is a very valuable thing that they passed along to me."

After getting his B.A. and M.A. in English and American Literature, Robinson got his Ph.D. at U.C. San Diego, doing his dissertation in 1982 on the subject of author Philip K. Dick. Reworked slightly and published as The Novels of Philip K. Dick, this volume is still considered one of the best reference works on the subject. It was through PKD that Robinson discovered science fiction, when literary critic and analyst Frederic Jameson recommended Dick as a significant writer, regardless of genre. "Despite all this childhood reading I had never known that science fiction existed. So I discovered it late, but found it tremendously absorbing. To me it was the best possible way to describe how my youth in Orange County had felt--that kind of future shock. So my undergraduate career was kind of a two track thing, where I did the standard undergraduate work, but I also did a complete education in science fiction in about three years. And when I started writing short stories, they were science fiction short stories without any conscious decision."

#

Robinson met his wife Lisa late in the '70's in Davis, California, where she was going to UCD, and he was teaching half time and writing half time. "We got a lot of work done and had a great time. Then Lisa finished her Ph.D. in environmental chemistry and she got offered a post doc in Zurich, Switzerland. I took this opportunity to quit teaching and in 1985 I began writing full time."

Before going to Zurich, they took six months off and he and Lisa did some traveling. They visited Egypt, Greece and Nepal, where they did some hiking in the Himalayas. These exploits are the basis of scenes in The Gold Coast, and the hiking in Nepal was the inspiration for stories compiled in Escape From Kathmandu, one of which has also been reprinted in a Sierra Club anthology.

They were in Zurich for two years and then Lisa got a job with the Food and Drug Administration in Washington D.C. That was where their son David was born. After two years there, they returned to Davis, where Lisa began her current job with the U.S. Geological Survey, at their office in Sacramento.

Robinson is happy, and his contentment springs from more than physical location. This is obvious when asked about Lisa's role in his writing career. "Lisa reads my work before anyone else--when she can carve out the time. She has a very sharp eye for logical discrepancies, and plot things. But the most important part of it is everything else in life. I'm a happy man, and out of that context and grounding I'm able to be very productive. I'm content, so I can focus. You can't ask for anything more."

Juggling the demands of career and family hasn't always been easy for Robinson, but with David in preschool seven hours a day, Dad can now count on a big block of time daily for writing. "For a couple of years after David was born I watched him full time, and I was only writing during his naps. That was when I wrote Red Mars and so the whole process was slowed down. I figured I was maybe working 50% my normal speed."

One of Robinson's great passions is hiking, and he has begun to share it with David. "We've been backpacking two summers now. David likes it. He's quite the uphill animal. I'm trying to make it completely fun for him."

Robinson was hooked on hiking long before David was born, however. Walking over the land, wandering alpine ridges and meadows, or strolling through forests, has been an important inspiration for Robinson and an ingredient in his work from the start. In fact, hiking and writing began together for him. Although he had long been interested in writing, and trying it, he was not having much success. "I'd have short spurts of activity followed by long periods of thinking about how to do it and why what I had tried to do was bad, and generally getting discouraged. Then in the summer of '73 I decided that no matter what else happened, each day I would write a poem. It was the start of a discipline I never really lost. I've always been pretty directed since then. That was the same summer I went to the Sierras for the first time. So the two began at the same time and it all intertwines. “When I'm in the mountains I'm often thinking about writing, and," he adds with a laugh, "when I'm writing I'm often thinking about being in the mountains."

While he still writes poetry, published poetry of Robinson's is rare, consisting mostly of a smattering of verse throughout The Gold Coast, lots of blank verse in his short story "The Disguise" and a sestina in Memory of Whiteness. A proposed volume of his mountain poetry, translated into French, has stalled due to the French editor being elected to the European Parliament. "I'm not a good poet," Robinson frankly admits, "so it isn't that I'm hunting to find new ways to get these things into print. But I do believe in poetry as something prose writers ought to keep trying at, and think about, because it sharpens your sense of language and the rhythms of language, and matters of precision and music that ought to be in mind even when writing prose. I feel I write my best poetry in prose paragraphs."

A year or two after beginning his hiking and his regimen of daily poetry, all the elements seemed to come together for Robinson. He began selling short stories at the age of 22, when Damon Knight offered to buy a story he had submitted to Clarion, the important annual science fiction workshop. Robinson was accepted at Clarion, but couldn't attend then. Nevertheless, his career was started. "The thing is, for the next 6 years I couldn't sell anything to anybody but Damon Knight. I was writing very slowly and Damon would buy my best stories, because I always showed them to him first, naturally. So for a really critical period in my career I was basically working in almost a patronage system, where I had one editor who was supporting me, and that was enough to inspire me to great amounts of effort. Damon Knight was a crucial figure to me for a long time."

Robinson's short stories have been published regularly since, through a variety of publishers, and garnering many awards for the author. His first book, The Wild Shore, first installment of his California trilogy, appeared in 1984 and began a string of books that brought Robinson more awards and nominations. Most recently, Red Mars won the Nebula for best novel of 1993. He has received almost every major award in the field, except the Hugo. "I learned on the electronic network system that I'm current champion for most nominations for the Hugo without a win. Eleven, I think, at this point. I would love to win one."

Robinson knows, first hand, that awards have their value. He sees their importance in a writer's career, early on, in calling attention to his work that it might not otherwise have gotten. "It also will encourage publishers to take a chance with you. It will incline them to think of you as more important than your sales figures might justify. Publishers—a lot of them—got into publishing because they love books. They're in a business where they need to sell books, and the love of books, and the need to sell books don't always fit together too well. So if they can publish someone who's winning awards, then they feel good about doing quality work as well as quantity."

In addition to his hiking and his poetry, an important source of inspiration as Robinson faces the daunting blank page (or screen) during his writing sessions, is music. His love of music is rooted deep in him. His mother was a piano instructor and there was always music in the house as he grew up. "It was a major part of my life. I learned to play the trumpet and still play, as a private recreation. And I've always been interested in listening to music. Often times when I'm writing I try to find music to play that will soundtrack the mood I'm attempting to evoke in the writing, feeling that some of it may get across, influence the sentences, and give them some of the emotional cast of the music I'm hearing. I often feel that if I could get people, while they read my work, to listen to the same music that I listened to when I wrote the scenes, it would be amazing." As an example Robinson cites his 1988 short story, "Glacier," which was written while listening to the album "Sun Singer" by Paul Winter. "I must have played that album 120-150 times. 'Sun Singer' takes only about a half hour to run through, and it takes about a half hour to read 'Glacier'."

Large sections of Icehenge, his 1984 novel of archeology and hoax on Pluto and Mars, were written listening to Ray Lynch's "Sky of Mind". Astor Piazzolla, modern master of the tango, is one of his favorites. "Piazzolla has written tango music that is very complex. A lot of sections in the Mars books dealing with Maya Toitovna were written to Astor Piazzolla's 'Nuevo Tango'. It perfectly expresses her moods. He's a wonderful composer." Robinson is considering doing a book of miscellaneous Mars material, a companion volume to the Mars trilogy. He's thought about including an annotated discography that would describe the music he used during the writing of the trilogy.

#

It seemed to him that he had been destined to suffer
the curse of stage fright, in a world where
performance was all.
—The Memory of Whiteness

The Memory of Whiteness, his 1985 novel of an orchestra's grand tour of a civilized solar system, gives musical performance a major place in human affairs. But actually making his own music publicly is difficult for Robinson since getting so nervous at a recital, at 9 or 10 years of age, that he lost the ability to play a clear tone. "If I had to play the trumpet again in front of even five of my closest friends, it would make me nervous in a way that talking doesn't anymore."

Yet, performance is where it's at, for Robinson. "There's something fun about the notion of a performance that you're never going to see again. I much prefer live theater to the movies, because you've got a human on the spot and it takes their total presence—not just as an image or a voice, but as a complete body and animal. At that moment it's just you there—performer and audience. We lose that in science fiction, which is very literature oriented. A lot of the science fiction community is completely uninterested in readings, for example, and it's sad because they miss a lot of incredible readings. The first time I ever encountered Terry Bisson's 'Bears Discover Fire' was listening to Bisson read it. One of the reasons why that story is, to me, one of the greatest science fiction stories ever written is that I heard it in his voice before I'd ever seen it on the page. It was a great performance." It amazes Robinson that at conventions of 2,000 people, maybe five will consider it entertaining enough to go hear an author read his work. "Blows my mind. But I'm into performance. They're not."

Robinson has found a way to perform, too, even though he is not an actor or a musician. He has used several years of academic experience as a visiting lecturer as a springboard to lecturing widely on science fiction. He visits Georgia Tech and other universities, and science fiction conventions, giving talks on subjects that interest and concern him. He never writes them down. He just shows up with an index card worth of notes and wings it for 45 minutes to an hour, trying to make it entertaining. "So these are also improvisations. There's nothing else I can do that is good enough to entertain people. It's a way of enjoying that part of performance where I don't have to worry about stage fright anymore."

So far, Robinson has given talks on such wide ranging subjects as Philip K. Dick, the New Wave, British science fiction, postmodernism, Utopia, population control, and Samuel R. Delany. He tries to work up a new one for every WorldCon. "I enjoy them, and I think they're valuable for organizing my thinking."

Clarity of expression is the sine qua non of writing for Robinson. "Modernism begins with two enormous, monstrous, great, giant novels: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and Joyce's Ulysses, and they're sort of polar opposites in a lot of their attributes. I'm very much a Proustian, and very much anti-Joycean. I believe in clarity of expression and the clean line of prose of Proust, as opposed to the murky, stream-of-consciousness style of Joyce, which supposedly imitates the way people think, but I don't think it does. Essentially I come down on the side of classic clarity, and in one's sentences actually stating meaning after meaning after meaning."

#

...the real and the actual always count
more for Lucy than the theoretical.
—The Gold Coast

While striving for the best in his writing, and giving voice to his highest aspirations, Robinson is thoroughly pragmatic about the business he is in. "It's a team sport, and everybody is in it together to try to sell the maximum number of books."

Team player Robinson feels he has been blessed with most valuable players from the start. There was his mentor, Damon Knight, his first agent, Patrick Delahunt, and wonderful editors. "Everybody has their role in the process. For many years I had the same editor for most of my novels, Beth Meacham at TOR. She's a good friend and a great editor. But now I've cast loose into a sort of free agent situation. It was Lou Aronica who brought me to Bantam and I've had a good, friendly relationship with Jennifer Hershey," his editor on the Mar trilogy.

"The nature of the field is now so fluid and editors and writers move so quickly that now the anchor point for me, in terms of professional contact, is my agent." Ralph Vicinanza, heir to the Delahunt stable of young writers, is Robinson's agent now. "He will be my agent for as long as he wants to stay in the game. I'm extremely lucky to have him. I need his advice badly to negotiate the world of modern publishing, because it's more than any writer out in Davis can learn."

#

The old man told me when I was done writing
I would understand what happened,
but he was wrong again, the old liar.
—The Wild Shore

With his orchestra in place and his instruments tuned, what has Robinson decided to play?

Although his academic credentials are substantial, Robinson has chosen to write very little criticism, which he feels he's not very well suited for. He also does not believe that, in general, it is a very good use of a fiction writer's time, relative to other things they could be doing, like writing more stories.

One of Robinson's critical essays appeared in "Foundation" magazine in 1987. It was the result of reading and admiring the works of Cecelia Holland, a writer of historical fiction. "She wrote one great science fiction novel, Floating Worlds. I'm a big admirer and collector of her work. At one point I just got so pleased—thrilled—by her work (it was teaching me so much about everything) that I wrote this essay and sent it off to Ian Watson who was editing 'Foundation' along with Edward James. So almost all my criticism (which amounts to four articles) are appreciations. If I get to that degree of enthusiasm where I actually want to tell the world how much fun I'm having reading this person, I'll do it."

Several major themes recur constantly in Robinson's fiction, chief among them being history. The process by which the past is revealed to us, and the difficulties of determining the truth have always held a fascination for Robinson. "When I was reading as a child--and I was not a science fiction reader--historical fiction and reading straight history was one of my main interests. I would get obsessed with Scottish history, or with Napoleon, or with the Renaissance, or the American Civil War. I would get these interests and I would madly read everything about it."

The degree to which he became involved with his readings is clear from Robinson's reaction to his first contact with historical hoax. "One time I got extremely interested in Pre-Columbian visits to America. I was just young enough that I was reading the kind of books in the public library that claimed that there had been maybe 15 visits to America before Columbus, all of them found, the books claimed, in the archeological record. But the Norse were the biggest of them, and it turned out that they were real. Except they weren't quite as real as we thought they were. I was really into the story of the Kensington Stone. Then I read some more serious books on the subject that just dismissed the Kensington Stone, which I firmly believed in, as an obvious hoax. And the shock of that for me as a teenager was a big one."

Robinson has retold this story in his fiction a couple of times, as a way to understand or disperse some of that shock. In his 1991 short story, "Vinland the Dream," he takes the alternative history genre into a new realm by making such a convincing case for all Norse Pre-Columbian sites being hoaxes, that unless you already know about these sites, you could easily be duped by the story. Gregory Benford, noted scientist and author, called Robinson shortly after the story appeared to ask how much of it was true.

Another treatment of this same idea was his second novel, Icehenge, which dealt with mysterious ruins on Pluto.

#

Initial conditions are never fully known.
The butterfly may be on the wing, it may be crushed underfoot.
You are flying toward Hiroshima.
—"A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions"

The fact of a hoax is not really the central issue in the author's lingering love affair with history. Robinson's stance on the subject of what drives history appears to be somewhere between the personality theory and the sweep of events theory. None of the futures he has created in his fiction hold any great importance for him in terms of being predictions. "I think that real history is going to be simply different than what we can imagine. It's a chaotic system and there are all these events that are going to come and make major impacts on history that we can't predict at all."

A popular image used to illustrate chaos theory is the beat of a butterfly's wings changing the weather. But what moral responsibility does the butterfly have for bringing or preventing the storm? To read Robinson's works (especially the short stories "The Lucky Strike," an alternative history of the bombing of Hiroshima, and "A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions," which puts you at the controls) is to see that Robinson concludes that the chaotic nature of history does not diminish but only heightens each person's moral responsibility--that we should all strive to become the butterfly.

Thus one role of the writer (for Robinson's kind of writer, at least) is to paint pictures of different types of futures, and illustrate, "...what we ought to--what I think we ought to work towards, as opposed to what we can try to work away from."

Utopia and dystopia are exactly what Robinson serves up in his California trilogy. His sincere concerns about the fate of humanity, still trapped on this one little ball of dirt, is a theme running through all his work. "Right now the population is five billion. The UN estimates it might go as high as 18 billion. Other people are trying to calculate the carrying capacity of the Earth, and it looks like we are overshooting that capacity, and it just bodes poorly. We're going to overrun our ability to feed ourselves and at that point I fear a kind of 'me first' tribalism. The kind of response that says, “If 50% of humanity is going to die off, then we're going to be part of the 50% that doesn't die'."

Robinson expresses these concerns in the most emotionally involved terms in his fiction. Having a son hasn't changed that, but it might be giving more of an edge to his sense of urgency. "Because you would like to pass along a world in less than disastrous shape. So I've been more focused on these issues. It's harder to put them out of mind."

His concepts of responsibility apply to artists as well. "I have a very strong commitment to art. I live the life of an artist and I believe in it as my own psychic integrity and definition. But it seems to me that something we always have to keep in mind is the social context that we're making our art in." His 1986 short story "Our Town" is a study of just this question. "The sculptors in that society had obviously tried to escape into art. It's like the famous Edgar Allan Poe story, 'The Masque of the Red Death,' where, while the plague is going on, all the rich people retreat to this castle and they have a long party, while outside the culture is dying. Their attempt to just escape from the world and disappear off into their own space, and make art a kind of excuse to ignore what's going on--that was strong in my mind when I wrote 'Our Town'. Art has to be kept in the context of the society that you're in, and used as your political action as well as your own personal expression. Or else it becomes escapism real fast."

Robinson's personal expression can hardly be called escapist. His fiction is among the most thoroughly researched and well informed in the genre. "Yeah, I like getting down to the technical details, and I think it's useful to understand the way things work."

This understanding is achieved through meticulous research, in Robinson's case, and through direct observation in the case of his characters. Almost no one in his books is satisfied until they have gone out and seen and touched what they wish to know about. While this is a wonderful narrative device, simplifying exposition by making it part of the action, it is clear that Robinson prefers knowledge obtained directly, through the senses, to that gotten vicariously through second hand reports. The texture of the real is the best source of truth for Robinson. "I'm not into computer-created realities and games, which I regard as the ostrich with its head in the sand. I'm opposed to making commodities out of natural pleasures. With all the problems we are having, this is the worst time to get involved with expensive toys."

It is perhaps for these reasons that he has mixed feelings about science fiction, which he values as a sort of avant garde act, pulling ostrich heads out of the sand and forcing people to look at what is really happening. "I think it's always engaged in that work. It has the potential for teaching people (I have to believe that). But by and large I think it cheats, in terms of talking about distant planets and time travel, and just keeps skipping out on this next 200 years--and yet that really is the period that to me is the most interesting of all. But you get negative feedback when you write about the near future, in terms of sales."

Yet Robinson has been doing exactly that--and successfully-- bringing the next 200 years to life as he brings a whole planet to life in the Mars trilogy. His research has been unparalleled. While he'd love to visit Mars, just long enough to see for himself some of the mighty landforms he has written of, that's not likely to happen. So he has stood on the shoulders of experts on Mars, to get a closer look, and share the view with his readers.

The Mars in Robinson's books showcases the best current thinking on the planet, a manned mission, survival and terraforming. This is thanks to the help of scientists at the edge of the frontier who were willing to talk to him. Among them are Christopher McKay, planetary scientist and co-winner of the first Thomas O. Paine Award for Advancement of the Human Exploration of Mars, Martyn Fogg, another planetary scientist, Robert Craddock, who maps Mars at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., and Michael Carr, author of The Surface of Mars.

Robinson's relationship with these authorities begins with a simple phone call. "I tell them I'm a writer and I'm having trouble with this issue (and it's their issue), and that I read about them or read their book, and would they have a few minutes to answer some questions. I say I'm going to put it in a novel. 100% of the time, they've never heard of me before. Nevertheless, they'll answer my questions. I try to send them copies of the book that includes their material. A lot of times I'll get a response from them and then often I will ask them for help again."

In spite of his exhaustive research, Robinson never loses sight of the fact that he is a novelist. Among his sources, for instance, conservative estimates of the time it would take to terraform Mars range from 10,000 to 20,000 years. So to be able to make the process a very real experience for his characters (and therefore for the reader too), Robinson has shortened the terraforming to the quickest it could possibly be. This involves the weilding of enormous amounts of energy, but it's just barely possible.

The second thing he did was invoke an idea from a previous novel, Icehenge. The life-lengthening gerontological treatments would allow the same characters to see the beginning and the end of terraforming. "So essentially this is fantasy. People talk about how these books are hard science fiction, but in trying to fit the terraforming of Mars into a single human lifetime I've done some fantasy type things. I've speeded up the terraforming process and I've lengthened human lives, and I've tried to cover it with science fiction explanations."

Nevertheless, Robinson has the greatest respect for the physical realities of the universe, and most of his work flows with the inevitability of realistic characters in believable circumstances. "I don't believe in faster-than-light travel. I don't believe that science fiction ought to just casually ignore the realities of time and space. I've also never really believed the aliens in science fiction stories."

When he set out to write his own alien story, "Blind Geometer", his 1987 Nebula Award winning tale about a blind mathematician, Robinson faced a dilemma. "I was going to do the whole thing in math and equations. But eventually that idea didn't work out either. Well, I had read a book about teaching blind children and the problems involved. I got interested and read some more books. One about the psychology of the blind was very suggestive and interesting in a way I had never thought about before. I finally realized that a blind person was probably going to be my alien. He's still a human being—still believable—but using a different sensory system, therefore very different from us."

#

They lived in miserable times, in some ways,
but by God it gave them something to write about!
They had something to witness!
—The Gold Coast

Robinson takes seriously the writer's responsibility to be a witness for the times in which he lives. A forceful, poignant example of this is his 1986 short story, "The Transect". It is the story of a train ride in the American Northeast/South Africa. Robinson achieves a forceful impact with this story, not through anti-apartheid polemics, but by making black life in South Africa, and its contrast with Western wealth, a real experience for the reader through sensory detail, our best path to true knowledge.

The story is dedicated to Thabo Daniel K. Moeti, a South African black man who came to the U.S. in 1984 and enrolled (illegally, according to his homeland's laws) in a foreign university, UC San Diego, where Robinson was a visiting lecturer. "I had a class that was too full, but he just looked at me and said 'I need this class.' So I let him stay. I taught him everything I could about writing, and we spent many an evening together out on my porch, and Thabo told me everything about South Africa."

Thabo told of being arrested in the Soweto uprising in 1976, of being in solitary confinement and forced to spend a day standing in tennis shoes filled with gravel. "He had been tortured and incarcerated by the South African police. So he had amazing stories to tell. I lost track of him three years later, and I fear for him because he was very politically engaged, and the last ten years in South Africa have been so violent. Many times I've worried that he's been killed."

Fearing repercussions from the story, Robinson made the dedication in the first edition simply "For Thabo". Eventually, with the passing of time and the political changes occurring in South Africa, Robinson expanded the dedication to Thabo's full name. "A lot of these things I do are like messages in a bottle. I'll name characters after friends of mine that I've lost touch with, and hope that if they come across that name that they might contact me again."

#

It's time for praxis now, rather than words.
—The Gold Coast

The key for Robinson, as it must have been for Thabo, is to take action. This shows repeatedly in his writing, and thereby does Robinson make writing his political act. Action is an important element in the California trilogy. In Green Mars Robinson shows the awakening of a political agenda in Saxifrage Russell—the terraforming member of the First Hundred, destined to become the "mad scientist for the revolution"—and follows his gradual adoption of activist values. This is an important subject for Robinson, and he spends a large part of Green Mars following Sax's odyssey from science to scientist as hero.

"My wife is a scientist, and so I've hung out with a lot of scientists, and I'm kind of a science groupie. I like the problems they set out to solve, and I like listening to them talk. They amuse me. While I don't like Star Trek at all, I find that the only thing that makes it worth watching for me is Spock. He's such a great image of the human being trying to be rational, but actually being very emotional, and the paradoxes of that stance vs. the reality. I think he says a lot about the scientist character in our culture, and even of what scientists themselves think they're doing."

Novelist Robinson sees the scientist as a wonderful character, which is not being exploited in much of science fiction. "The name 'science fiction' implies a lot more scientists than we really get. It's filled with rocket ship captains, adventurers, detectives, down-and-outers, etc., but people have a hard time getting a fictional handle on scientists because science is not intrinsically dramatic. That's one reason I love Gregory Benford's Timescape. The university context, the academic scene and the physicists doing their work—that's all rock solid."

Social thinker Robinson sees scientists as important to the work of improving our global situation. Science is very powerful in our society, he notes, elevated in some ways to god-like power—making the scientist god-like. What advice does he have for real scientists? "I think they ought to become much more politicized and try to seize control of their own work. Most scientists today are not in fact choosing their own goals, but goals are being chosen for them. And yet they are uniquely powerful. They could say 'That will go,' or 'That won't go,' or they could say, 'That might go but it's not worth doing,' or they could even say, 'That might go but it's completely trivial, and what is important to do is this and we're going to do this, and what are you going to do to me?' I think scientists could become a political activist force for good. I think they should all become utopians. That's what I would tell them: become utopians!"

Does he have any visions of the solutions scientists and the rest of us should act to bring about? It will be a variety of approaches, that's for sure. Any claims made that one group or another has all the answers is suspect. He's really down on the "One True Way" attitude, which he finds a horrible flaw in Christianity, Marxism, Deep Ecology, etc.

"'Deep Ecology' is a kind of splinter movement with very unrealistic short term plans. It's pretentious even in its very name, which implies the rest of us are shallow and they're the deep guys. But when it comes down to the current world situation they don't have much of a practical program except anti-immigration, which certainly misses the main problems."

Robinson much prefers taking a multi-dimensional, multi- solutions approach to getting ourselves out of the fix we're in. "The front is broad and there's got to be a lot of approaches that will work. And there's a lot of good in the deep ecology view, which says that keeping the system running requires the whole rest of the biosphere. Even if you believe that human beings are the one and only part that counts, it still comes down to the same practical approach—keep the whole biosphere going and try to fit into it naturally (or at least efficiently) so that it all keeps running."

#

Historical analogy is the last refuge
of people who don't understand the current situation.
—Red Mars

Does Robinson think there is help to be found in the study of history? Not as much as you'd expect, which is surprising coming from a man so intensely fascinated by it. "Obviously you have to study it to glean what you can from it, to try to approach the present moment sensibly. But if you try to understand now as the pre American Revolutionary period, for example, or generally if you use analogies to some past situation, it kind of blinds you. And mostly they're inapplicable. The situation is constantly changing to the point that a lot of history doesn't teach us much that is useful at all."

Robinson presents his ideas in his fiction with caveats and qualifications, chief among them being that he is a writer of novels, not a philosopher or a scientist or a politician. "The thing is, my own views are in flux, and often times contradictory. I'm a novelist more than a political thinker, so I express all these varying feelings through the mouthpieces of various characters who are much more centered in their thinking than I am. So my indecisiveness is a great advantage as a novelist, if I can channel it into these voices, and if these voices are then convincing. When I'm writing from Ann's point of view, then I really believe it, and then when I'm writing from Sax's point of view, I really believe that. I think this helps make good novels, so I don't fight it anymore."

While destruction is an element in the California trilogy and the first two Mars books, it is in no way proposed as a means to better ends. In Red Mars we witness sabotage on a planetary scale, and in Green Mars impressive destruction is used as a political weapon. "I suppose, especially in this Mars trilogy, it's just been the story that forced me to do these things. I don't have a theory about this. I don't make an explicit statement that these events are necessary or inevitable. It's just that the hidden logic of the story insists that that seems to be what happens next. I try not to have too much of a plan when plotting my novels, because I feel that would be too didactic. I try to allow for some kind of ignorance in myself of what I'm doing, so that the novel springs out of basic unconscious motivations and decisions. It's real important."

But isn't destruction sometimes the only, therefore sometimes the best agent of change? Certainly not, says Robinson. "I'm very leery about the notion of destruction being helpful in any way. So often it just basically is destruction. People adapt to it, but I don't think it really is helpful to have it happen."

#

The Swiss stared resentfully at his intrusion.
This was not done.
—"Zurich"

Yet Robinson is always careful to provide us with an anarchist. Whether it's in the form of a renegade splash of color in an otherwise pure white Zurich, Switzerland, or a rebellious sculptor in "Our Town", or a mysterious stowaway on the voyage to Mars, the free agent is a crucial element in Robinson's stories. It's a touch of color and life in the hermetically sealed white plastic bowl of the megaculture.

In a stunning image in Green Mars, Nirgal looks at the surface of the lake near his ice dome habitat, and sees both the green of the algae covered bottom and the white reflection of the ice above him. The dichotomy of existence--the white and the green--is revealed to Nirgal in this moment. It is the duality of life and abstraction, of biology and pure thought--the mystic and the scientist.

The green is referred to in the Mars trilogy as "viriditas," and it's something precious that Robinson does not want lost, or swallowed up by the great commodity culture, a fate portrayed in The Gold Coast. Robinson has had his own startling proof of the pervasiveness of this megaculture. While hiking in the Himalayas, weeks away from civilization, he encountered a native Tibetan wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt.

Are we losing important values with the inescapability of this cultural homogenization? "Yes, I think we are. The world has become too shrunken. It's become too hard to attain the surprises of discovery, that sense that you're off the edge of the map. But I do think it can still be done. There are places on this Earth that are still wild, physically and culturally, India and China being two enormous examples of the latter—the Indonesian peninsula, Africa. These places are all different to the point that I don't think we've totally lost cultural diversity yet. The world is so big and various, and there's such disparity between first world and the third world that you still have a lot of strangeness."

Getting off the edge of the map is certainly what Robinson has achieved in going to Mars, and through his crystal-clear, economical style, the reader can feel the crunch of the regolith under his feet and the diamond cut of the Martian cold. He can be there, right beside Robinson's many characters as they strive to turn this pristine planet into a world of man.

Just exactly why did Robinson pick Mars? "There were a lot of converging factors. If you want to write realistic science fiction about going to another planet, it's the obvious choice. It's our nearest neighbor and it's right there—ready for us. And we learned so much about it in '69 and '76. Before that they just didn't know much. In the books from '65 and before, it's amazing how little they knew. And so a whole new world has been given to us, and I find it really interesting."

Having been a vicarious one man Lewis and Clark expedition to this new world for a large part of his professional life, Mars is a personal matter for Robinson now. Not unexpectedly there are conflicting impulses warring within him about man's future use of his red planet. To leave this fantastic planet untouched, the Ann Clayborne imperative, has strong appeal for him. But terraforming the planet has an inevitability that Robinson can't deny. And he accepts that. "I think as a long term project it'd be a beautiful thing to do. It has the potential of becoming a world with a biosphere. If we went away at that point, evolution would continue, and God knows what might happen. That's a spectacular notion. We tap it with seeds of life and help it to get going, and at some point this process of ecopoesis, self regeneration and self terraforming, would begin. It could happen and it would be an amazing human feat. It would mean that history had this creative act in it that humanity as a community did. It's so mind boggling. The enlivening of a world!"

But everything that reaches for the light must grow in the soil of reality. All our blueprints for change must be founded on the bedrock of the here and now. Robinson is well aware of the difficulties facing man as he contemplates going to Mars in reality. "NASA is struggling for existence. They're in such desperate straits with the budget, and the national budget is so deficited, Mars is not going to happen for many years, I think." Given the current situation, Robinson's scenario in Red Mars for the beginning of this great adventure is probably not far off the mark. It takes place 35 years from now, and involves an international team, with Russia and the U.S. being in a leadership position. "I don't think any other nation is in good enough shape to take that role. We've got these huge military budgets. If they let those go away quickly they would cause a massive depression worldwide, so that some kind of use for these aero-space programs would be useful to keep the economic wheels rolling."

No matter what the outlook for a real human presence on Mars might be, the fact is Kim Stanley Robinson has been there already and has taken many readers with him. His books are achieving sales and critical success that's got to be as satisfying to him as it is delightful for his publisher, Bantam. His editor, Jennifer Hershey, who speaks glowingly about Robinson's powers as a writer, and considers it a special pleasure working with him on the trilogy, sees his success as part of a market shift. "He's part of a trend we've been noting lately. Really strong, substantial, well written novels are selling better than ever right now. The Mars books will certainly hold up to any critical reading—main stream or genre. I guess Stan is one of the most well-informed scientific imaginations that's out there in hard science fiction right now. And it's not at the cost of characterization or subtle human interaction or dialogue." While she's convinced that the books deserve to be, and probably are being read by people who don't normally read science fiction, there is really no way to know for sure.

Among the many positive reviews, there have been pronouncements that Robinson is carving out territory in the main stream, that he is breaking out of the literary ghetto of science fiction. Robinson tries not to think in those terms. "Genre isn't a very useful concept when you're working on a novel. I mean, I want to make it the best novel I possibly can, scavenging any area in any tradition to try to bring things to bear that will make this a better novel. I believe in the novel as a genre in and of itself, and all these other category genres that try to break down the novel into various smaller categories—to the extent that they chip away at the wholeness of what a novel can do, I don't like them."

The myth of the mainstream being the home of greater sales does not impress him at all, either. "In publishing terms there's a 'genre' called 'the best seller', and it scavenges from any category. It can be a techno-thriller, like Clancy, it could be horror, like King or Barker, it could be mystery, like Elmore Leonard, or espionage/suspense, like Robert Ludlum. Asimov used to be a best seller. Heinlein as well. Those books were read by a lot of people who were not science fiction readers, per se. I would love to run off the end of the chart from the science fiction world into the best seller world, sure."

He's hard at work on his next chance for a best seller, and/or a Hugo. Blue Mars promises to be awe-inspiring in its climactic moments. "A hydrosphere...that will be a major impact. We're going to have a lot of water and a lot of wear and tear on the surface features—a lot of movement of water to the southern hemisphere through precipitation, and then water channels tearing the surface. It'll be awesome."

Work progresses, and Robinson is enthusiastic about his latest visit to Mars. "I would hope to finish it in the middle of '95. I'm more or less on track. I'm having a great time. It's possibly the most fun book I've ever written, so far. It'll get hard later, when I really try to solve all the problems. But it's the most fun first draft I've ever written, which bodes well for everything else."

#

I'll stay right here and fill another book.
—The Wild Shore

Robinson looks beyond Blue Mars, to his next project, like a hiker who, while climbing to one mountain top, plans his next assault. "I always have several ideas. I'm not sure exactly which one I'll do next. I'm sort of waiting to see which one wins the mental battle."

It's hard for Robinson to abandon this obsession with his great red talus world, however. He has this idea in mind of a companion volume which would have the short story "Exploring Fossil Canyon" and the novella "Green Mars" and a third story as the fictional basis of many miscellaneous essays, and pseudo-non-fictional articles. "There's a lot of Mars stories that didn't fit into the novel—out takes." And acknowledgments pages, "...because people do so much for me, often times just for a voice over the phone they've never heard before. It's very nice the way people are—the way scientists are—the sharing of knowledge and their enthusiasm for what they're doing."

But there is a deeper reason for the companion book. Without it, on completing Blue Mars he'd have to say good-bye to Mars. "That would be psychologically very difficult for me. In all my other novels before, when I've come to the end there's been a tremendous sense of sadness and alienation. Up until that point the characters are alive and they're speaking to you—they can say new things to you and you are in an active relationship with them. When you finish writing a novel, though, you become a reader of it like anyone else. It's frozen on the page. New sentences don't appear, and those people you got to know—it's like they moved away, and it's sad. To have it happen on a massive scale, like this trilogy, and those characters I've been with so long, I have the feeling it would be real hard." But if those characters ever come out and speak to him again, the companion book would give his new Mars stories a home. "At every reprinting I envision this book getting a little bit longer. It's as if the Mars trilogy will never really end. I'll never have to shut it off and say 'This project is over'."

The prospect of closing this chapter, of freezing it on the page, goes against the grain of a man and author so in love with performance. It's like the difference between sheet music and improvisation. To continue to play is the thing, whether it's in the gargantuan sand box of Mars, or in the reality of your own life—whether alone as a private recreation, or in a Jazz band.

Like Satchmo? "Yeah, Armstrong's one of my heroes!"

Robinson unfolds his newest geological map of Mars with the pride of a hiker showing off his newest topo map before a trek to the mountains. He resumes the search for Solis Lacus with a grin as wide, though perhaps not as blinding, as that of Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong on the wall behind him.